Field of the Invention
The systems and methods taught herein are generally directed to assembling, displaying, and evaluating a visual ensemble of musical performances that include a plurality of submissions from remote locations uploaded through a network to a director for the assembly.
Description of the Related Art
Music is a pleasure that is shared by most, and although there is a lot of musical talent to be discovered in the world, it can be a daunting task to discover it. Individuals that want to be discovered, for example, can find it difficult to gain exposure, and talent scouts that want to find talent are limited to finding talent using currently available methods often including traveling to live performances, auditioning live, or perhaps by a manual screening of recorded submissions that are sent to the talent scouts from remote locations. The process of traveling, scheduling auditions, and manual reviews of submissions can be expensive, as well as tedious, and quite subjective. Moreover, it can be even more challenging to assemble a band using such talent that has been discovered independently, from the remote locations. Discovering talent that both looks and sounds good together as an ensemble of performances that work well together as a band, for at least these reasons, requires extensive screening, travel, communications, scheduling, professional recording assistance, and the like. This is because, currently, you can't simply receive multiple separately recorded submissions and play them together as an ensemble in synchronization, and there's currently no technical solution to that synchronization problem, making live auditions necessary.
American Idol and The Voice are examples of extremely popular forums for discovering and displaying talent to the public, each of these forums sampling talent across the United States with the goal of discovering new talent for the public to enjoy. Jeff Zucker, the former NBC Universal chief executive has been said to have described American Idol as, for example, the most impactful show in the history of television. It's not unusual for a single episode of the show to attract over 30 million viewers. In its first ten years alone, American Idol created Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Daughtry, Fantasia, Ruben Studdard, Jennifer Hudson, Clay Aiken, Adam Lambert and Jordin Sparks and remaining one of the highest rated television shows.
The process of choosing winners in such programs is long, arduous, expensive, and limiting, requiring the use of actual judges, transportation of the judges to actual physical locations for auditions, an extensive amount of time to hear the auditions, and limiting the participants to only those that can actual appear at the limited and actual audition sites that have been made available to the participants. The American Idol selection process, for example, includes several rounds—an initial three rounds of preliminary additions, a Hollywood round, a Las Vegas round (now the Sudden Death round), semi-finals, and then finals. Although auditions can exceed 10,000 musicians in each city, only a few hundred make it past the preliminary round of auditions. Those making it past the preliminary round then sing in front of producers. If they make it past that cut, they then proceed to audition in front of the judges, which is the only audition stage shown on television. Those selected by the judges are sent to Hollywood. Around 10-60 musicians from each city might make it to the Hollywood round. The “top 20” musicians from the Las Vegas round move to the semi-finals, after which the public takes over in the selection of musicians by voting, which has occurred through phone, text, and internet channels. The “top 10” then move onto the finals for more voting. The Voice, also with an incredibly high number of viewers and voters, has a similar structure with “blind auditions”, “battle rounds”, “knockout rounds”, and live shows.
Electronic solutions to these physical limitations have been attempted with limited success due to the problem of having to sort through a massive number of submissions, and this, like American Idol and The Voice, is done physically by human reviewers and, accordingly, is subjective to the reviewers. YOUTUBE, for example, is the world's largest video-sharing website and has been credited for finding replacements for members of popular classic rock bands like Journey, Boston and many others. While it's easy to point out a few success stories, the arduous task of sorting through the endless amount of potential talent is clearly overwhelming, and the answer to this problem has not been solved, and has not been considered obvious to those of skill.
Although these processes provide great value to the public, they still have several technical problems that limit their value as an effective auditioning tool: (i) the limitation in sampling of talent due to the requirement that auditioners and judges meet at a particular physical location; (ii) the limitation in obtaining the best performance by the talent due to the stresses of performing at the particular physical location on demand; (iii) the limitation of having to physically review large numbers of auditions to find the best subsets of talent; (iv) the limitation of the physical reviews being subjective to the reviewer; (v) the limitation of having to physically review a daunting number of electronic submissions; (vi) the inability to select different types of talent and review them together, as an ensemble, due to the inability to align the performances and swap-out band members at will; and, moreover, (vii) the inability to view them together using both audio and video to see how they look, as well as perform, together as a band. Accordingly, those of skill in the art of music, auditions, and the selection of talent will appreciate the solution to these problems set-forth herein.